Marketing is Signposting the Customer Journey

​Present a website, run a campaign, send a brochure, meet face to face, engage at an event, chat on social media, speak at a conference; Whatever your marketing communications, there is one thing that’s certain. Allow your customers to choose how, when and where they engage with you and there’s no knowing where they’ll end up. I would bet my house that they will end up somewhere inconvenient to you and to them.

Marketing communications is all about choreography. Helping a customer to travel step by step through a carefully integrated set of experiences is key to them ending up in the right place that adds value to them and to you.

Without clear signposting at every step of engagement they may make uninformed choices at best and at worst leave the journey all together for fear of ending up down some dead end alley.

Try this on your website if you don’t believe me. Create some clear buttons and links that click through to a specific page and from that page take away any option to travel deeper or further into their navigation. The removal of a clear next step signpost will result in them halting with a bemused look on their face and then pressing the back button or re-searching for what they were initially seeking.

It is all so simple. Whenever you want a customer to move to the next step, create a clear sign that takes them there. You wouldn’t expect to navigate around a new city in your car or on foot without some indication of your journey map and marketing navigation is the same.

In marketing terms we call this the customer journey and at each step the sign, or call to action, must clearly lead the way and eventually to an appropriate destination.

Take your own customers’ journey yourself and see how it looks from their perspective? Do you need to start putting up some new or better signs?

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